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The Micro BR - small is beautiful

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• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

Over the last few years we've seen attempts from several companies at making a pocket-sized multitracker, often with results that are aesthetically more Bulgarian HGV than Porsche Boxster.

Boss bucked that trend, however, coming up with this slickest looking piece of gear, the Micro BR. The smallest in their range of do-it-all multitrack recorders, it packs in a 4-track multitrack recorder with built-in mic, amp simulations and onboard rhythms into a sleek silver box that sits neatly in the palm of your hand.

The Micro BR takes its power from the mains via a 9V adapter (optional extra), but is designed to be fully portable so can run off a couple of AA batteries for up to six hours if you're away from a mains power supply. The portability factor means it would be impractical to have an internal hard drive - removable media in the form of SD (Secure Digital) cards are thus used to store the audio. The Micro BR will take any capacity card up to 1GB. A 128MB card is supplied with the unit, and to squeeze the most out of the storage capacity, there are three selectable recording modes: hi-fi, standard or long mode, which progressively allow more recording time for a slight trade-off in audio quality.

With four playback tracks, each with eight virtual tracks, the Micro BR has plenty of capacity (with an appropriately sized SD card) to store alternate takes of whatever is being recorded. Recording can be in mono or stereo - there's a mini jack stereo line/ mic input plus a quarter-inch Hi-Z input jack for plugging guitars straight in. The small mic built into the front panel is extremely useful for recording acoustic instruments or humming in musical ideas.

Although a portable multitracker like this has a multitude of uses, it comes over most strongly as a tool for guitarists with a set of axe-friendly features, such as hands-free recording initiated by programming in punch-in and punch-out points.

There's also an onboard chromatic tuner and a large number of insert effects specifically for guitar that use Roland's COSM modelling to recreate the sounds of a wide range of amps, cabinets and effects. These aren't necessarily for recording - guitarists could use them simply for a bit of silent practice through headphones, especially when allied with the onboard preset rhythms.

Another feature that will put a smile on guitarists' faces is a phrase trainer facility whereby a favourite track can be loaded in and slowed down or sped up without altering the pitch.

This is allied to a centre cancel function, which massively reduces the level of whatever is centre of the stereo picture so guitarists can not only slow down a track to learn parts, but they can also effectively remove vocals or a guitar solo and have their own guitar sound right up the middle so they can jam right along.

Songs can be loaded into the Micro BR in MP3 or WAV format and it can in fact be used as a portable MP3 player with an SD card loaded with MP3 files.

Getting back to the multitrack facilities, there are a set of basic digital editing tools carrying out all the usual cutting, copying and pasting tasks, and there's also a track-bouncing mode to build up bigger arrangements - up to four tracks can be bounced down to a single virtual track or a pair.

Although panning and volume can be adjusted there's no provision for track EQ, and send-and-return effects are limited to a single AUX send for each track that can add in either Hall or Room reverb.

More processing can be applied to the final mix via a Mastering Tool Kit with a range of presets that offer compression and EQ tweaks.

Stereo mixes can be converted to WAV or MP3 format and transferred to computer via a USB connection that also allows the import of such files, as well as the backup of BR data. The Micro BR appears as a mounted drive on your desktop, allowing easy drag and drop file transfer.